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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Glen Greenwald on Tucker Carlson's show shits all over the CIA and puts in a succinct way the ties between Israeli intelligence and Epstein, lo and behold suddenly on the same day his private sex tape with his husband gets leaked.

My favorite part of this is the anti-woke-right brigade suddenly deciding they don't like gay sexual degeneracy.

Suddenly? Acknowledging that it is a dangerous disease spreading subculture has been part of the anti-woke right from the beginning.

Yeah looks like parentheses are in order. I meant anti-(woke-right), not (anti-woke)-right.

Following Trump's recent victory, some anti-woke centrists decided they need to make sure the pendulum does not swing back too far in the other direction, and started attacking people to their right. They coined the term "Woke Right" to show that their actions are justified by the more extreme elements on the right being functionally the same as the woke left.

It's these people that suddenly decided that boosting leaked videos showing you're a paypig findom-enjoyer is a valid angle of attack on someone.

Maybe using capitals? anti-Woke Right is different to anti-Woke right? Though I agree, it's confusing all round.

As to the videos - I don't know the guy, it's cheeky of me to put forward opinions on his personal morality, but it's a tough one. The gay acceptance/gay marriage movement pushed hard on mainstreaming as representing "no, all that stuff about gays being degenerate is propaganda, they just want to get married and have kids like you".

And then the guy has his sex tapes released and oops yeah gay widower with kids is engaging in kink with prostitutes. Well, just like straight guys too so I suppose that is true equality!

I have to agree that this particular kink isn't the worst example of perversity that it could be, just second-hand embarrassment for anyone who doesn't share those kinks. I think we as a society probably are gone past any surviving standards of "public figures should behave decorously" never mind "private citizens shouldn't be frequenting prostitutes".

I still don't understand why the hell people make sex tapes (or take nudes for their partners) in the first place, though. We have plenty of examples of how that goes bad - the tapes get leaked, you break up and your ex uses the nudes for revenge porn, or even in the first place while you're still together they're sharing those private images around with their friends.

There's... a lot of guys where "if it'd never leave my circle of friends" is absolutely a desirable state, rather than a risk. Exhibitionism can have a lot of different drivers, ranging from the less good (eg risk-taking) to the better (eg, here's power over me because I trust you, I want to be seen as scoring good at sex which is a normal and possible thing to do), but even outside of gay circles that have particular reasons for it (for Greenwald's age range, getting caught doing this was at least theoretically a crime when he started fucking, which adds a lot of frission to 'oh no someone caught me') it's pretty common.

The risks make it undesirable for even many with the kink, and should probably make it undesirable for many more that are thinking with their upper head, but it's not an ungrounded fixation.