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Notes -
Quoth the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership:
Is Trump actually going to try to do it? Probably not. If he does, will it actually be upheld? Almost certainly not. But it has been proposed by somebody.
Ok, yes, "somebody" has proposed it. Just not, you know, Trump, or Vance, or any official Republican platform.
Besides, from the context, it sounds like theyre mostly talking about showing trans stuff to kids? I dont think "educators and public librarians" really show a lot of porn. I know the schools have slipped but i dont think its quite that bad yet...
For some reason I haven't quite been able to fathom, a lot of conservatives consider "exposing kids to transgender ideology" and "sexualising children" to be basically the same thing. This is presumably why they're combined here. But they are clearly hostile to pornography itself as well.
While it's possible to present trans-related issues in a mature-as-in-serious rather than mature-as-in-adult or mature-as-in-Garth-Ennis sense, it's really hard to do so with enough detail to be a meaningful discussion instead of a handful of fuzzy buzzwords.
People like LoTT focus on pieces where there's explicit sex- or sex-like stuff (eg masturbation, performing oral sex on a dildo/prothesis), generally because they are more immediately uncomfortable to viewers, and less charitably in the hope they'll get censored to demonstrate how prurient such pieces are. But it's pretty common to see works that, if not quite so explicit, still delve deep into matters of sex and sexuality, even if they're aimed at early- or mid-teens audiences, or feature primary characters well under 18.
I've pointed to Venus Envy before, as one of the few insights to the trans-internal view of things in 2004-ish, but it's also a webcomic that opens with a 16-year-old's 'tuck' failure, and goes on to upskirt a (cis male) crossdresser of mumblemumble age to point out that he wasn't getting aroused. Serano's Excluded is a well-regarded feminist work in progressive circles, and it also spends a pretty sizable period of time on the "penis issue" of Michigan's Womyn Festival.
That's not a problem specific to trans stuff: I've mentioned Blue Is The Warmest Color before as a work that seems well-regarded and also starts with a 15-year-old lesbian's first sexual relationships, and I've named a few writers before who do excellent furry gay-themed works that are also difficult to discuss publicly because they also include outright porn, come from authors who've written outright porn in the same series, or just involve a lot of sex-related stuff. But despite the gay-themed literature being more fundamentally tied to attraction, it's as common in trans-focused stuff.
The counterargument is that, icky as it might be to adults, (most) teenagers run into this stuff themselves, and in other non-LGBT fiction. Media joking about awkward boners or weird sex toys exist, Catcher in the Rye has a lengthy section with a teenager trying to solicit a prostitute, Pern has its dragon-orgies (and we don't talk about the It novel). "What's the age of the main character in this coming-of-age-story" happens so much because most people don't wait til 18, and while not all of that story has to be about sex, a lot of people for a lot of cultures it is.
The counter-counterargument is that a lot of the socialcons aren't happy to expose younger teens to those works (and don't think it's healthy), either. They did protest American Pie and the entire sex comedy genre, did want steep age requirements for it, and don't particularly like the inclusion of Catcher in the Rye, either. To the extent that they don't care about Pern, it's because they weren't aware of it. They believe, with reason, that even if they try to keep their kids from exposure to this stuff, it is very likely individuals outside of their control will.
((Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors, either as an axiom or as a way to distinguish from 'simple' crossdress, where LGB works can conceivably treat romance as nothing more than kissing on the cheek (though they often don't like any of those either).))
The underlying theories are more esoteric, and I'm not sure I can give them a full explanation, but:
Huh. I never knew I was a hard socon, because that seems obvious on the level of water being wet.
The path of development that socons prefer being the latter. I don't think it's difficult to unpack why- you just have to invert one of the things you said.
Axiom 0: Socon texts (come to think of it, are there any non-Christian socons?) tend to be pretty clear that most deviant sexual behavior is both "natural" and more attractive than non-deviant behavior on its face, to the point where it's more strict on restricting what everyone else considers non-deviant behavior (i.e. Catholics and contraception). If it wasn't, not only would there not be warnings about it, but nobody would do anything else.
Axiom 1: Men and women are different and play different social roles; men are designed and suited to be at the head of a household and women are not.
All of their viewpoints are downstream from this and emerge as you combine other starting conditions.
If adults [pick your favorite definition, though socons naturally prefer the legal one] can barely handle sex, obviously it's going to fuck up and confuse someone who isn't an adult even harder- "traumatized" is useful language to describe this. As a steelman, see the 5th and 6th paragraph of this; a socon would say that clearly, seeing the porn derailed his expression of his natural social role and his sexual interests, and I'm not even sure I disagree with that
Suppression of expressions of deviant sexual behavior will encourage more non-deviant outcomes and push the marginal case over the edge (all experimentation is tempting you slide back towards that local maximum, and "normalization" is doing the equivalent of putting a slide on a slippery slope- just like it is for everyone else, kissing is less bad than sex, but it's still bad if it occurs homo-sexually because [see axiom 0])
Age-gating is the compromise position if they can't ban it outright- "train up a child the way he should go", and all that- and there are ultimately practical limits to what you can and cannot prevent your adult-aged child from doing (but that's what social pressure, and making that age-gate as high as is practical, are for; those trying to bring the age-gate down- the groomers- are a problem because, among other things, they're chipping away at that compromise)
Neither can the socons, who will say it's "just the way it is". The socons that can explain it are by definition not socons.
I think so, although it probably requires a broader definition of socon than Christians would often use. There's a lot of Indian conservative culture that, while not perfectly overlapping for what it things the Golden Path is, still shares a large agreement on what the common 'degenerate' forms are. Sikh religious doctrine actually have more overlap than most people expect, modulo the underpants, to the point where a lot of Westerners flinch pretty hard when finding out. And Islam and Mormon (though Mormons consider themselves Christian) groups have their own versions.
This varies a bit depending on who you're talking with and what 'deviant' behavior. Monogamy (and avoiding sex before marriage) is one thing that clearly follows the path you line out. On the other hand, condoms are, rather infamously, something very few people develop kinks for (and when they do, it's often in contexts Catholics wouldn't want anyway) or enjoy. No matter how the longer-term personal benefits, there's a lot of reason that there's so much 'wrap it up' encouragement. Religious takes on male homosexuality are closer to your position, but Borderer views often devolve into it being at best easy (uh, for the top), but not particularly attractive or desirable except in the no-other-port-in-a-storm-but-a-goat sorta way, and there's a small faction of often-agnostic or atheist socons that give very sad tales about how porn caused them to downslide from vanilla straight sex into a series of perversion they'd never had even glimpsed at years before. And very few people get accidentally slide into a dress, makeup, and set of high heels without some external examples beforehand, or into a fursuit.
But I do admit these are just difference in framing: the line between superstimulus and temptation is a matter of view. Nobody likes condoms, but they like being pregnant or paying child support even less; as a bi furry I'll absolutely say that there's a lot of surprisingly benefits to both.
It's not so much "having a kink for condoms" and more "condoms enable you to have consequence-free sex which is bad because
something something natural lawyou might discover that consequence-free sex means the relationship with your spouse is dominated by sex for the sake of sex than for other more productive reasons".This isn't really a position I hold natively; my views on sex/uality are a lot simpler than average (since they kind of avoid the question entirely), especially because...
...being one of those people gives some [from what I can tell] unique advantages for introspection about those sorts of things. (Communicating that introspection effectively is an entirely different story, though.)
Fair, and sorry for wrongly attaching the position to you.
To be fair, I did successfully hold that position for many years until I fully realized (or rather, had it pointed out to me) that I was, in fact, faking it.
(Which is kind of the problem when I simulate the standard traditionalist or progressive viewpoints, because to re-derive them I have to start with "first, assume self-interest, then" in places it's not "supposed" to belong.)
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