This comment was posted on the Big Proud Scrotal Sacks blog I put up:
“Would you pay $11.82 for a plate? I would. Mikasa, a 60 year old dinnerware company, sells a Cheers Diamond Dinner Plate for just about that price. From their website: “The Cheers pattern is made of fine china that is accented with whimsical dots, stripes, and spirals for a cheerful and useable mix and match concept. All pieces are dishwasher and microwave safe, and are sure to be used day in and day out.” Versatility in style and durability in construction. $11.82 is 1/118th of $1,400.00.
Incidentally, 17 cents is also just about 1/118th of $27.13. 17 cents is what it would cost me – in wear and tear to my computer, electricity, and broadband connectivity – to spend 140 minutes (in 7 twenty-minute sessions) looking at free pictures of you on Freeones.com. A simple use of their “order by date” function shows that there were 85 free galleries featuring you as of August 1st, 2008. If, on average, each gallery features 15 pictures and if I spend, on average, 10 seconds looking at each one, accounting for an additional 30 seconds needed for navigation, it will take me an average of 3 minutes to consume a gallery. I would need to look at 7 galleries in order to spend a full twenty minutes on that site; and I would need 49 galleries in order to do so 7 times. Leaving me another 36 galleries of which I have no need, except perhaps to compensate for any redundant galleries.
All fascinating, certainly, but why the figures? Why, specifically, 20 minutes, 7 times, and $20.13?
If individual photo galleries and/or videos on your pay website, ClubKayden.com, are in keeping with what I, to the extent of my knowledge, consider to be the average size/length of particular updates on other porn sites, then it would take me 20 minutes to consume an update from ClubKayden aswell.
If, on August 1st, 2008, I had purchased a one-month subscription to your site, I would have had access to 7 updates featuring you – either solo or with another person(s). This is the date at which, as best as I can tell, your has been live – or at least providing significant content. It is all I would have had to look at.
If I were to consume “new” (to me) content featuring you via Freeones.com at the same rate that I would be able to consume it from ClubKayden.com, it would have cost me a price that was 1/118th of the same 140 minutes spent consuming ClubKayden content. Instead of paying $19.96 for a month of access, and in addition to the same 17 cents worth of fixed costs, I would only be paying the fixed costs. $0.17 is 1/118th of $20.13.
Now, of course, my argument falls apart once we consider any activity beyond this 30 day time frame. After just another 30 days – September, 2008 – my virtually-free source of Kayden Kross content from Freeones would exhaust itself. The rate in which new galleries are added could not keep up with the rate at which I would consume them. Additionally, if taken as a whole, the monthly update average on ClubKayden increases by over 50% – from 7 to just over 11 – in latter months. Eventually, I would be left with no choice but to subscribe to ClubKayden in order to consume unseen content. This would run up the cost to just over 60% of what it would have cost to just subscribe in the first place and to forego the free content. Or, in “plate terms,” I would be paying $840.00 for a plate; hardly expressive of a fundamental difference in my previous attitude towards money.
But such extra-contextual considerations beg the question: why consider them? What is it about the product which guarantees that irrational financial decisions are inevitable? Especially when the difference between rationality and irrationality is so strikingly large? Why wouldn’t a rational man, when you slapped him with such an increase in cost, give you a virtual “fuck off” and go find another woman’s free content? Why would he take your shit?
If you claim to be the type of person unwilling to exploit the weaknesses (ie: irrationalities) of men, and if you claim to hold their money in high regard, and if you wish to be certain of it for longer than an evening of blogging about it, you must answer that question. You must explain why so much of your pornographic content – the source of your livlihood – is available for next to nothing when so much of virtually the same thing is available aswell, but at an 11,800% mark up. Or, more accurately, you must explain why this comports with your professed convictions.
You must explain to yourself why the emotions driving that woman to substitute a $1,400.00 plate for authentic respect for her husband are not the same emotions driving a man to substitute a $20.13 porn site subscription for the capacity for sexual joy that 17 cents worth of electricity, internet connectivity, and free content is supposed to be sustaining (and not exploiting). Explain to yourself why that psychologically neutered man you observed is not doing the same thing as a sexually patinaed woman giving into whatever weak pretentiousness she thinks she must identify, entertain, and ultimately appease in order to survive – and fluorish (financially at least).”
Ok as weird and out of context as I find your post, I’ll respond to it. Forget the fact that you’re comparing a personal relationship to how I run a small adult entertainment business. Whether a man determines that he gets any utility from some hardcore pictures of a stranger vs. how he lets his life partner treat him have no correlation as far as I can tell. What I can tell you is that those I know personally I’ve already given free login information to. That alone should hurt your argument.
You’re confusing hormones with emotions. Hormones are what drive people to search for jack off material on the internet. People don’t pay for membership to my site because they’re emotionally attached and I’m stringing them along. They’re paying for my site because they have dicks and healthy sexual appetites and I happen to appeal to their jack off taste for the moment. If you think I should be offering this service for free then you obviously are no objectivist yourself.
You must understand utility as well. I’m sure you do. I’m sure you aren’t assuming that the personal satisfaction that man got out of the $1400 dish was at all equal to the personal satisfaction that a man must get out of a month’s worth of fresh updates for $20.
Even if you were right, and my naked pictures have somehow skyrocketed to the level of a marital relationship, then your numbers are wrong.
You are basing everything on the number $1400 for a month. I guarantee that woman cost the eunuch much more than $1400 that month. I would say even more than $1400 just that day. I doubt she got decked out and went down to the mall with him for one dish. She already had shopping bags on her arms. She was covered in jewelry and Burberry. So unless I’m charging $20 a day for membership you can’t even compare the two (not that you should be in the first place).
Now you don’t seem to understand the online adult business very well either. I’m no expert, but after reading your response I can gage that I know more than you. You based your numbers on a 15 picture set. Do you know why Freeones gets free 15 picture sets? Because they are teaser sets given to them by the site that owns the content. For example, when ClubKayden.com or Suze.net sends 15 pictures to Freeones, Freeones then links back to the site and creates traffic. And it’s called a teaser because you’re only seeing 15 pictures out of a 90 picture set. So recalculate the time it takes you to consume a full set.
Please also recalculate the time it would take you to go through the content on my site. My site went officially live Sept. 15th, but we did a trial launch on Sept. 1st. Do you honestly think I launched my site with no back dated galleries and videos? Do you think I turned on my site and whoever signed up got access to my one and only content update for that day? No. Stupid. I shot and stored content for one year before my site went live. And do you really believe that you’re only getting 7 updates a month? The first month we did daily updates, and now we do updates 5x a week.
You also dumbed down exactly what you get out of a membership. A membership to ClubKayden.com does give you original picture updates. That’s what you based your math on. Now please calculate in the original video updates, the live chats, the girl of the month updates, and the hardcore content from other models. All of these things are updated weekly. That means new pictures, new videos, new hot girls, new chats, and new hardcore sex every single week. Then factor in the interaction that you absolutely cannot find pirated on the internet somewhere and you’ll see why a rational man would be able to justify the $20 expense. That’s cheaper than what it would cost for one DVD or lap dance at the local strip club after your cover fee and $9 soda. Or are you saying it’s irrational to satisfy any sexual desire?
Now if you buy a monthly membership to the site it does come out to about $20 per month. But you can buy a package and get it for half the monthly amount if you know you’ll be sticking around. See, we already thought of those who might exhaust the backdated stuff. I assume the first number you threw out (17 cents being 1/118 of 27.13) was a typo because 23 cents is actually 1/118 of 27.13. You did come back down to the correct math later in your post (20.13). I don’t know how you can factor in your energy and broadband and wear and tear costs at 17 cents (my cost is higher and I don’t think I’m overpaying), but I’m not going to jump to conclusions on your rigorous math.
Anyway, hopefully with this new insight you’ll be able to recalculate and come back with a better attack.
5 Responses
You said “whether a man determines that he gets any utility from some hardcore pictures of a stranger vs. how he lets his life partner treat him
have no correlations as far as I can tell.” I reject the false distinction between hormones and emotions upon which you operate. Why would a man read your blog? Pay to video chat with you? Attend your personal appearances? Agree to pay to see more of you? Why would you offer a blog, a video chat, a personal appearance, or a website in the first place?
Why would a woman be incapable of sexual attraction to an “empty human vessel” if they were truly seperate?
You were the one proposing that the man got no genuine satisfaction from the $1,400 dish. I agree. He only appeased the woman because he is emotionally invested in her. If, in fact, he was aware that all he was after was the sensation of being a gregarious husband, he could have “cancelled his subscription” and found a readily available cheaper alternative. But he did not. He paid the $1,400 for that moment’s “enjoyment” and told himself – just as, I’m sure, she tells him through daily “updates” of her own – that by doing so he was sustaining something more fulfilling. Because, by giving her what she wanted, he see her thoughts, let her hear his, and see more of someone who, deep down, he doesn’t respect. He was blind to to how irrational he was being – but his emotions (and I’m sure his hormones) were not. You witnessed his melancholy yourself.
I know you anticipated subscribers to your site wanting to consume more than the equivalent of what is available for free elsewhere; and that you adjusted things like your pricing structure and your cooperation with Freeones to accomodate it. That was my post’s point: to ask you why. Why are you expecting a man to care about anything other than seeing your body – which, as I painstakingly demonstrated, he could see the same amount of, for virtually nothing, elsewhere?
As for specifics:
– Enegry, broadband, and computer wear and tear are all national averages. 17 cents is the sum.
– Back dated content is irrelevant. It is not advertised. Any rational person would assume that your updates reach only as far back as August. If he had signed up in August, he would have been paying up front.
– Other women are also irrelevant. Why would someone pay to see you in order to see someone else? Someone else they could see for free elsewhere no less. That’s telling you to “fuck off.” In my analysis, I specifically ignored updates not featuring you for that reason.
– You also profit from DVDs and dancing at clubs which charge for entry and for drinks. I could have analyzed those things also, and made the same point.
– I know about 90 picture sets being the norm on porn sites. 10 seconds per pic x 90 pics = 900 seconds. 900/60 = 15 minutes. 15 minutes + 5
minutes for navigation: 20 minutes. A time equivalent to watching a video, which I also considered to be an “update.”
– If the man spends more than $1400 on his wife in a month, that does decrease the force of my argument. Not enough to make it invalid however. $1,400 per day x 30 days is $42,000. And an increase from 17 cents to $20.13 – 11,800% mark up – divided by 30 is still a 393% markup.
– Why would a rational man pay nearly four times more than necessary to access something? Something which, even if it is relatively scattered, you allow to be available for nothing. If you think he should pay that then – according to your superficial notion of what an Objectivist is – you’re no Objectivist yourself either. Reread D’Anconia’s speech about money.
Go ahead and reject my distinction. Go ahead and commit yourself and every one of my members to jack off monogamy. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it. You can argue all you want but I’m going by results and the results of my posts of other models are good. My members like them. Hot girls light up my chat boards. The most active topic on my website is other girls. And why are they paying for my live chats and so on? Because they can jack off to them. I don’t talk about the weather. I pull out toys and talk about why I like blow jobs.
Attacking the fact that I profit from any of this is a moot point. It’s a fucking business and as soon as you can separate that from a personal relationship you’ll get over it.
And the point was not about how much the man spent on his wife. Maybe he invented post-its and $1400 is a drop in the bucket. Maybe $42,000 is a drop in the bucket. The point is that he was treated like a piece of furniture when she didn’t need him and then was suddenly promoted to a living thing when she snapped her fingers and needed a wallet. Then he went back to being a piece of furniture again. I’m not against gifts. I’m against a man letting himself be anything less than a man.
So if you’re all for that, then please believe that I am as sincere as I have ever been when I wish you the best of luck in finding your own personal cunt. As for me, I’m going to keep living every day as if it might be my last to treat the men in my life with dignity.
Now back to your math. If you really believe this then I can only assume that you don’t go to movies because it’s cheaper to wait for them to come out on video. I can only assume you never eat outside of your home because it is always cheaper than restaurants. I can only assume you’ve never left a tip because tips are things left for services that make things more convenient for you and it’s cheaper not to take advantage of them. Each of these things are arguably more enjoyable than the option you’ve calculated is most cost effective. I would argue that ClubKayden.com is more enjoyable than Freeones if I’m what you’re looking for at the time. Adam Smith made a pretty compelling argument about consumers being rational. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be able to make a science out of economics. You don’t seem to have quite grasped the concept of utility yet.
Or maybe you’re right and Adam Smith was the asshole.
I thought that I could imply this through a demonstration of the attitude’s impracticality. I thought that a dramatic show of all that has to be left unconsidered would leave you with nothing to consider but what I wanted you to. I overestimated you. I apologize. I know that, as a rule, there is no such thing as the perfect argument. That anything can be evaded. I will be as succint in my argument as I possibly can.
When a man takes a woman shopping for frivilous things his purpose is to observe in her, and thus to experience in himself, a condensed expression of the same emotions he can feel only diffusely in other, more serious and complicated situations. Experiencing her in this setting is like experiencing a work of art. Her joyful enthusiasm, her refined consideration of what is beautiful, and her implicit recognition that letting him observe those traits brings him joy evoke in him a pleasant reminder that he brings the same passion, the same rigorous judgement, the same pride to his own endeavors. Her actions serve as emotional fuel for him and in turn he provides her with the practical means by which to perform – and to enjoy performing – them. Of course, she enjoys the objects she shops for in themselves; but in addition to that, and essential to it, she enjoys being enjoyed enjoying them.
Why was this married couple you observed any different? Why, instead of evoking expressions of joy in him, was the husband quiet and reserved during a shopping trip with his wife? The answer lies in a failure to appreciate that emotions cannot be faked; not for any longer that the span necessary to express something which will wipe out any chance to identify their cause. And even then they spring right back – unacknowledged but felt and (subtly, non-verbally) expressed just the same. They return because their cause remains.
The cause of that couple’s inappropriately reserved emotions towards one another, while engaged in an act of emotional intimacy, is that both had ulterior motives. That the act itself was not for it’s own sake.
The husband was incapable of taking pleasure in his wife’s love of beautiful things because he sensed on some level that she did did not care if he did so or not. His emotions told him that to her, aside from the trivial act of being there to deliver the money, it made no difference to her if he was there or not. He knew, subconciously, that what he was watching was not an independent mind at work expressing it’s love of independently determined beauty; and it’s pride in having it relished by another. Thus, his demeanor betrayed a nagging, unadmitted suspicion that her enjoyment of being enjoyed enjoying the plate could, and likely would, come not from him – who had made it all possible – but from a haphazard collection of socially valuable admirerers. When a man is suspicious he is cautious, reserved, subdued.
Her ignorance of what it meant to ignore him betrayed all of this knowledge loud and clear, but his mind could not identify it. His self-delusion – prolonged by her periodic, half-hearted attemts at prolonging her own – prevented him from saying it to himself. Instead, he could only feel it; and to withdraw, in silent, bewildered protest. He was trapped, beholden to a desire to maintain an idea of what she once might have been (or worse, what he had only ever imagined she was), and the pain of facing it felt far too costly. Far more costly than the $1,400.00 plate standing in as this moment’s reprieve.
Their entire relationship is a pretense; with neither fully able to accept nor to reject the fraudulent version of love upon which they mortgage their time, their money, their sexuality, their lives. Both of them know, on some level, that because they profess to love and understand each other that they should do things which exhibit this love. And so, despite their ambivalence towards it, they do things like go shopping together. But the joke is on them; their plan back fires. Instead of extinguishing the guilt they both feel towards themselves, such an experience heightens their awareness of it – and so they must take further action to conceal from themselves the nature of their pretention. They must propound upon their self-delusion.
The husband withdraws, and perhaps tells himself that things such as love, lust, respect, and romance are seperate things; and that he should not expect to find them in the same woman. He quietly rides on the high of viewing himself as a sort of gregarious, disinterested patriach. The wife, conversely, tells herself that she admires her husband’s “masculinity”; his reserved and stoic attitude towards frivilous things. As is becoming of femininity, she only engages him in them when she must, and desperately attempts to feel that her half-hearted, girlish terms of endearment suffice as authentic expressions of love. She completely blanks out that what prompted them was something as dull as the sales girl’s motion in the direction of the cash register.
No, she is not after his money per se. That is only what she tells herself when the opposite set of lies wear thin. And no, he is not after her respect regardless of what he thinks of her standards. That is only what he tells himself when his lie that he loves her will not suffice. What both are really seeking is permission from the other to continue to fake it. To serve as props for one another. Bit players in a privately played out farce with no end and no clear beginning. Him, in her mind, the douting husband to the fashionable, lovable society lady; and her, in his mind, as the delicate wife of a strong, unassailable man with no needs or wants of his own.
What they both want is to not be forced to acknowledge what it is that is actually occuring between them, and how cheaply they could have had it had they just been honest from the beginning; before they had lost the perspective that made them able to know what each was doing to him and her self. That is why the husband will gladly earn; and why the wife will gladly spend. That is why the charade keeps going, to greater and greater heights – with greater and greater symbols acquired, produced, or pronounced. They come into existence, not as expressions of honor, but as tools, meant to suppress as much recollection of the feelings felt at the time as possible. To be looked at, not as reminders of a fully involved experience, but as sign posts loudly proclaiming “Look, I’m beautiful, I must have been purchased with love.”
I you still refuse to see the analogy there, you’re hopeless. That’s fine; but just please stop referencing Ayn Rand publically. And, certainly, stop mimicking her sense of romance in your blog posts; even if you believe them at the time you are writing them. Besides, no one needs to hear about your personality anyways, correct?
You changed your tune. I’ve been against the way the couple interacted the whole time. First you’re defending him and now you’re calling his relationship bullshit. I’m sticking with it being bullshit.
As for Ayn Rand, I have publicly stated I admire her a number of times. I like a lot of her ideas. I have never claimed to be a staunch objectivist. You brought her name into this not me. You sound like you’ve substituted religion for philosophy. You’ve done the equivalent of quote scripture. Now you’re preaching and apparently trying to direct me. I’m absolutely not interested in taking guidance from an anonymous commenter who works as hard as you have to build an argument out of my feelings on whether a man should allow himself to be walked on.
You are that man’s wife. Recognizing it periodically does not change that. That you chose to write about it on one of your business’s blogs about it only makes it ironic. Tragically ironic? I’m not so sure any more.