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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   16117 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

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A couple of months ago we discussed the cultural legacy of the Playboy mag of all things under an effort post by @FiveHourMarathon. I was reminded of this by a recent lame-ass political scandal in Hungary in which a local/district volunteer coordinator of the main opposition party and apparently a single(?) mom was doxxed by some pro-government journos as a former porner / sex worker. Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way. Pretty much the only factor fueling this whole thing was that the party leader and MEP was pictured shaking hands with the ‘lady’ during some public events.

What does Playboy have anything to do with this, you might ask? Well, said party leader decided it’d be a swell idea to reverse the accusation of sleaziness and would also be some sort of clever gotcha to point out that a 51-year-old woman who’s a government commissioner and a former ‘Secretary of State for Sports’ (if you’re one of the few female politicians in Eastern Europe, it’s the sort of government position of lesser importance you can ever hope to fulfill, I guess) appeared in a photoshoot in the local edition of Playboy ages ago.

Anyway, I’m aware that culture wars are waged with maximal cynicism, dishonesty and opportunism, and this is a case of culture-warring alright; no need to remind me of that. Still, I found myself asking the rhetorical question: who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?

Pretty much the only factor fueling this whole thing was that the party leader and MEP [Péter Magyar] was pictured shaking hands with the ‘lady’ during some public events.

So is this guy named the equivalent of "Senator John America"?

I, for one, am strongly in favor of calling these people actors and actresses, not out of respect towards prostitution but out of disrespect towards acting.

who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?

I guess this framing is weird to me. It seems to me one need not believe that two things are "cultural/moral/social equivalent[s]" in order to believe (1) those things should have similar impacts on one's political career AND (2) one's political opponents are behaving hypocritically by condemning one thing but not the other.

In this context I think it's completely fair game to point out the hypocrisy even though the degrees are different. In the immortal words of the poet Lil Jon, "Don't start no shit, it won't be no shit".

No right populist parties are really trad. The GOP have trashy serial cheaters like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Meloni is an unmarried single mother etc.

Melania Trump has also appeared in nude photo shoots.

She isn't involved in politics though.

Guilt by association is one of the first tenets of political mudslinging.

who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?

Given that she likely appeared when she was a bit younger than 50, I do not think that what playboy eventually shifted to is all that relevant.

If you want to play purer-than-thou, I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out. If you are posing for underwear, you can always say "the main motivation is to sell a product by appearing sexy to customers (mostly women), and if the odd pervert uses the ads as visual aid for masturbation, that it entirely incidental". Appear in playboy, and it becomes much harder to argue that guys becoming aroused by your picture was just an unintended side effect.

Personally, I do not believe that sex work should matter for politics. If a male politician paid a hooker for a blowjob I do not care. If he paid a domina for getting his hole fisted, as you might phrase it, I don't care. If some politician of either gender appeared as the centerpiece of a gangbang video, I do not care.

Of course, the other aspect is hypocrisy. If you have a party which is very much into sexual purity, then at some point the opposition is might point out the difference in what you preach and what you practice. If you or your mistress had an abortion, that is fair to point out when you are running an anti-abortion campaign. If your party is very anti-gay, then you visiting gay nightclubs might suddenly become newsworthy.

I am not knowledgeable enough about Hungarian politics to say how much either party is into sexual purity. I know that Orban is socially conservative and anti-LGBT, which will likely not make him enthusiastic about titty mags, but likely not to the point where they would outlaw them. The MEP leader of that opposition party was formerly in Orban's party and seems to be more pro-EU, while avoiding any CW issues. I do not think he is campaigning against porn videos.

I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out.

Playboy tried really hard to make itself seem much more classy than that. I recall one author (Isaac Asimov?) explaining submitting a story there as simply "they paid twice as much", but to a great extent it worked. Fahrenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy the year after it was first published. Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer ... and big-name non-authors did long interviews to be published there: Schweitzer, MLK, Malcolm X, Sartre, Welles, Kubrick, Toynbee, Carter...

Jimmy Carter might be the best example to consider: he didn't think of himself as pure, because (as he tried to explain to Playboy, which hurt his candidacy) he was the sort of serious strait-laced Christian to take "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery" as a straightforward explanation of a sin he had needed forgiveness for, but he was basically as pure as it gets for the 1970s, and although he never got his tits or anything else out for the camera, he literally had his photo published in Playboy.

I know that Orban is socially conservative and anti-LGBT, which will likely not make him enthusiastic about titty mags, but likely not to the point where they would outlaw them. The MEP leader of that opposition party was formerly in Orban's party and seems to be more pro-EU, while avoiding any CW issues. I do not think he is campaigning against porn videos.

You'd be right. It's his half-hearted attempt at reverse Uno which I find curious. And while avoiding any CW issues i.e. trying not to antagonize the normies, he made a social media post where he implicitly called the woman's former antics 'sinful' which as you can imagine didn't win the approval of local Blue Tribers.

Given that she likely appeared when she was a bit younger than 50, I do not think that what playboy eventually shifted to is all that relevant.

Do you? Most people aren't pop history nerds, and considering that the local edition of the mag folded in 2019, it's all bygone history anyway, and to the extent that people still remember what it was, they remember it as the slick, high-end mainstream mag. (The photoshoot appeared in 2003.)

who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?

They’re equivalent because they’re both equally fine, and both equally unworthy of further attention.

If we're going that route, then we have to also have to come to the conclusion that it is utterly fine for men to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women, AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn portraying the aforementioned stuffing of holes and similar levels of degeneracy.

If either of those factors came out about a male politician, then those factors would both be equally unworthy of further attention, for presumably similar reasons as the womens' conduct wasn't worthy of attention.

I'm sure we could hash out some set of circumstances where it was not fine. Lets say there's a Married mother of children who does porn without the knowledge of her husband, and not only does this trigger emotional distress for the husband, it can also nuke his reputation and lead to a divorce fight over the kids.

Since I assume you will ask I'll go ahead and state that it should be possible for a woman who does pose for a magazine in her reckless youth to seek political office and not be hounded by her past (assuming its all in her past). But the electorate is still going to consider it, and compare it to their other options.

I will also state that I don't think there'll be any harm done by a blanket soft ban on anyone who stars in a professional pornographic film from holding a political position.

I am absolutely 100% fine with keeping people like this out of public office.

I'm sure we could hash out some set of circumstances where it was not fine. Lets say there's a Married mother of children who does porn without the knowledge of her husband, and not only does this trigger emotional distress for the husband, it can also nuke his reputation and lead to a divorce fight over the kids.

If she is cheating on him to do porn, that would be bad.

All the reputational stuff is indirect, and applies to basically any behavior the public finds offensive, from talking to a black person, being in public with uncovered hair, saying "Guten Morgen" instead of "Heil Hitler", smoking, putting up a Dem/GOP lawn sign, or wearing a bikini at the nudist beach. The question of how much one should conform with expectations for the sake of one's (and one's family's) reputation is a difficult one and not specifically tied to porn.

So say that the wife is camming only (or in an open relationship) and is also blurring out her face (so there is no reputational risk). Or that her husband (in the case of an open relationship) is taking part in a gang bang video while wearing a mask.

I honestly do not see the problem. I mean, if the couple had agreed to a no-sexting-third-parties rules beforehand, that would be a breach of that, obviously. You might argue that in an exclusive relationship, such a clause is generally implied.

If we're going that route, then we have to also have to come to the conclusion that it is utterly fine for men to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women,

Why not?

AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn portraying the aforementioned stuffing of holes and similar levels of degeneracy.

I will grant you that at some point, this will likely affect the ability of a politician to perform his duties as an elected official. My comparison would be smoking. A politician who is chain-smoking and can not function in a government building where smoking is forbidden would be problematic.

On the other hand, I could not care less if the politician was a chain smoker a decade ago, or if he spent half of his waking hours jerking off.

I will also state that I don't think there'll be any harm done by a blanket soft ban on anyone who stars in a professional pornographic film from holding a political position.

Fortunately for you, the Constitution leaves who is allowed to run in elections pretty much to the states (apart from a few protected categories like race, sex and age (over 18)), with the current SCOTUS, you might get away with disenfranchising porn actors.

Let us suppose for the moment that anyone who has ever participated in a porn movie is a terrible human being and any candidate who did not have a porn past would make a better government official, i.e. that your rule would improve things on the object level.

This is also a new rule, which always carries a cost on the meta level. It also establishes a precedent. At the moment, the only large group of adult US citizens who do not enjoy the franchise are convicted felons (in some states). Your rule would mean that states could decide to remove any non-protected group from the ballot: perhaps plumbers (after all, a lot of porn actors play plumbers, kinda suspicious). Or employees of oil firms. Or people who have been to a pride parade.

Now, if the current president had run on a campaign promise to fuck a person from every county which had voted for her in the oval office on lifestream during her term and won through the horny vote, then I might agree that the overbearing influence of porn actors is a problem which has to be solved, but in the actual world, it is totally a non-issue.

Some people do not like to be represented by Jews, porn actors, MAGA, SJW, men, women, nonbinaries, plumbers, oil execs, DC elites, Blacks, Hollywood actors, reality TV stars, draft dodgers, veterans and so on. There is a really simple thing you can do to avoid that outcome: don't vote for members of your disfavored group. Sure, sometimes the vote goes the other way and you end up with a president you find terrible, but that is still better than the equilibrium of someone disenfranchising their outgroup.

I am absolutely 100% fine with keeping people like this out of public office.

I do not see the problem with her. Clearly she was wrong believing that a live stream would not be recorded or that the voters were not going to care, but come on, she was fucking her husband. How much more traditional family values can you get?

Apart from the probability of people recording, streaming sex is like leaving the blinds open on your fifth floor apartment with the explicit intent that anyone in the next building who has binoculars could see you fuck. Not my kink, personally, but who am I to judge?

If this is the level of desecration of marriage which you think should prevent someone from holding office, you probably think Bill Clinton or Donald Trump are Satan incarnate.

to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women, AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn

I think this betrays that the line you're trying to draw isn't really sharp. There is, IMO a slope (maybe even a frequently slippery one, not intending to claim otherwise here) between nudity in "high art" (enjoys fine wine and Rubenesque paintings), moderate-but-titilating scenes in Hollywood cinema, something like Playboy, and whatever depth of depravity you want to stop at. The debate on the appropriateness of nudity in art goes back literally centuries --- fig leaves are not a modern invention.

I'm not sure I would judge "modeled for the figure drawing course in college, maybe even for reasonable payment" in isolation harshly in general. But that's just my opinion.

I think this betrays that the line you're trying to draw isn't really sharp.

I can make it sharper, but I'm not really painting with a moral brush here.

I'm trying to reason about the type of person that's going to be wielding governmental authority and whether they are going to do a better job than the others I might be able to choose.

Commodifying sex is anti-social.

So if they do it for free, is that ok then? Thereby de-commodifying it.

Granted, commodities can be given away freely too, I suppose. But if I were to say, write a poem and put it on my own public blog for free, I don’t think anyone would call the poem a commodity. I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely. So it seems like I should be able to create and give away my own porn and have that be not-a-commodity too.

I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely.

See that's the problem. Unlike your poem, sex is not a good, service or other such thing. It's a relationship you have with others. The implications of which do not cleanly stop and start at the will of contracts.

This fuzziness alongside its other peculiar characteristics (irrational draw, propensity to create children, etc) is why it is not treated the same as other things morally by most societies. And why attempts to use reductionism to map it onto benign activities are wrong headed.

Drugs have similar problems that also make them special in this way.

I think that there are plenty of people (myself among them) for whom porn is simply the most ethical way to deal with their sex drive.

I mean, sure, porn is to sex as instant noodles are to cooking and eating a nice meal with other people. Just as good sex is far superior to jerking off to porn, enjoying a nice meal with friends is much nicer than shoveling ramen into one's pie-hole. On the other hand, porn and instant meals are also much more limited in how bad they can go. No main dish which is completely burned, eating in icy silence because someone is pissed or suffocating because someone forgot your peanut allergy.

Happily, while living from ramen does not go too well in the long term, humans do not actually require high quality sex to survive. For people who find themselves in a situation where getting laid would require ethically questionable behavior or a lot of work, or who would prefer sex in the context of a romantic relationship but also have trouble finding such a relationship or worry about the potential drama, just masturbating to smut or porn seems like a totally fine solution.

This fuzziness alongside its other peculiar characteristics (irrational draw, propensity to create children, etc) is why it is not treated the same as other things morally by most societies.

I would argue that no society has reached a cultural equilibrium since effective contraceptives became widespread.

Consider: a nomad tribe which moves around, perhaps mostly sticking to certain lands but sometimes being driven a bit in one direction or driving a rival tribe from some good nearby land will have a fundamentally different relationship with the land -- at cultural equilibrium -- from an agrarian tribe which has plowed 'their' land for generations.

As humans who have recently found ourselves in a world where PIV sex no longer automatically results in pregnancies, we recognize that the cultural rules of old are no longer suitable, just as a neolithic tribe who had (magically, suddenly) discovered agriculture would. It is certainly not the case that throwing all rules which now seem vaguely adjacent to the old status quo seems good, "we will no longer eat animals because grain is our food" might seem obvious but will probably not become an equilibrium rule. Likewise, "now that unwanted pregnancies are out of the questions, having sex can become just as banal as shaking hands" might not be an equilibrium take. Of course, insisting that nothing has changed would be like saying "just leave the fields, we have to follow the herds".

What similar problems do drugs have? If videogames cause similar brain signals, aren't those basically drugs? Maybe it's my wrong-headed reductionism speaking, but the reasons why societies treat drugs differently seem like boring practical reasons, not high-minded spiritual ones.

If videogames cause similar brain signals, aren't those basically drugs?

No. The difference is games produce natural-brain chemicals whereas drugs are alien to brain and produce much longer effect.

Boring practical reasons are high minded spiritual ones. There is no difference except maintenance through time. It's a mistake to think that virtues are the concerns of some untouched far away realm and not the common lives of common men of the common time.

What similar problems do drugs have?

They make reasonable men do unreasonable things.

Other vectors of addiction can do the same, but nowhere near at the same rates. Few men have killed because of a video game. Legions have for sex and drugs.

When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship (this particular kind of distinguished relationship, as you conceive of it)? Did you only decide that porn was a bad thing afterwards, on the basis of this conception, or did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?

This isn't a gotcha, I have no agenda here. I'm just genuinely and sincerely interested to learn more about how you think about these issues.

Uh, where did you arrive at the idea that it isn’t? It’s a paired activity, kinda inherently a relationship there.

When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship

Arguably it started when I read Plato as a teenager, but that's not what convinced me of it. I think it's about when I had friends of mine get back together for the third time after swearing each other off. That's about when I knew my mother was right both to say that sex makes people retarded and that it connects people on a special level other things do not.

But time has done nothing but confirm this for me. I've hung out with many a people of little virtue (I've probably had more candid conversations with sex workers of more genders than anyone on this website), and their existential angst seemed to be proportional to the amount of casual sex they had.

A decent amount of them openly whined to me about feeling desensitized and frustrated at how unable to feel anything for anyone they were.

Now I refuse to conclude something too specific from my life experience, because it's not really generally applicable, but I will certainly stand by the ancient idea that sex is special and that carnal knowledge is not like other acts in its implications on the psyche of the participants. That alone seems undeniable to me.

did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?

I do not actually believe pornography to be evil. At least not inherently. I've stood by its artistic merits and associated freedoms here before on numerous occasions.

I used to have far more liberal views on this particular matter, but these days I think it probably needs some effective regulation or at least social framework, like we do for tobacco or alcohol.

The complete free for all of hyperreal stimuli seems a bit unwise, seeing as though I've had multiple friends make stupid life ruining decisions on account of it.

Not the person you asked, but I was taught that sex was a relationship when I was taught about sex. I was also taught that porn "was a bad thing"; it was obviously lustful, but why specifically that was a problem was left quite vague. The vast majority of my conceptual model of why porn is bad I learned through direct experience.

What's your moral/ethical model for binging/purging as a method for enjoying food? It seems to me to be another example of the moral structure you're curious about here; "people see this as wrong, but why?"

Ah, FC, FC. I believe it's been a little while since we last spoke.

During our earliest one-on-one conversations, I had us pegged as being very similar types of minds. Although in every conversation since then I've gathered more and more evidence to the contrary. That's not a bad thing, not at all; it just is what it is. Either way, you continue to make a surprisingly excellent sounding board for different arguments and ideas, perhaps because of your enviable generalized easygoing nature. And so I'm going to babble incoherently at you for a bit about the topic at hand, in the hopes that at least one person reading this will find that the words contained herein bring clarity to some aspect of their own experience. @IGI-111 will possibly be interested in this as well.

To be perfectly frank, I find most of the typically stated "rational" reasons for the animus against pornography -- "it makes sex workers feel bad", "it's too addictive", "it distracts men from finding a real partner" -- to be, essentially, distractions. They don't really strike me as psychologically realistic, they don't smell vigorous, y'know? They give the impression that something is still being concealed. "Sex is special and pornography is somehow a violation of what makes it special" -- ok, getting closer, but say more, special how? There are lots of "special" things in the world, but they don't all draw this level of persistent sustained ire.

Roughly, my thinking is that there are two principle psychological causes of the general unease that many people feel with pornography:

  • Either the animus springs from the same unconscious mythopoetic wellspring as the prohibition against graven images of God, or:

  • There is a primal fear of its sheer destructive potential that cannot be reduced to any "rational" factor; although the line between this point and the former is blurry, and they may very well be the same thing. For what could be more frightful than the wrath of God, the wrath that God very nearly visited upon the Israelites for worshiping the golden calf.

Don't for a second think that there is no relationship between God and sexuality. An image of sex is very nearly an image of God, it is reasonable to confuse them, there is a very real risk that people might start worshiping the image as an idol. Lacan thoroughly explores the indissociable link between the two in Seminar 20 (humorously enough, the very same seminar that features the infamous dictum "the sexual relationship does not exist"):

"It seems clear to me that the Other -- put forward at the time of 'The Instance of the Letter' as the locus of speech -- was a way, I can't say of laicizing, but of exorcising the good old God. After all, there are even people who complimented me for having been able to posit in one of my last seminars that God doesn't exist. Obviously, they hear -- they hear, but alas, they understand, and what they understand is a bit precipitate.

So today, I am instead going to show you in what sense the good old God exists. The way in which he exists will not necessarily please everyone, especially not the theologians, who are, as I have been saying for a long time, far more capable than I am of doing without his existence. I, unfortunately, am not entirely in the same position, because I deal with the Other. This Other -- assuming there is but one all alone -- must have some relationship with what appears of the other sex. [...]

There is a little connection when you read certain serious authors, like women, as if by chance. I will give you a reference here to an author... [...] I don't use the word 'mystic' as Péguy did. Mysticism isn't everything that isn't politics. It is something serious, about which several people inform us -- most often women, or bright people like Saint John of the Cross, because one is not obliged, when one is male, to situate oneself on the side of [the phallic function]. One can also situate oneself on the side of the not-whole. There are men who are just as good as women. It happens. And who also feel just fine about it. Despite -- I won't say their phallus -- despite what encumbers them that goes by that name, they get the idea or sense that there must be a jouissance [enjoyment] that is beyond. Those are the ones we call mystics.

[...] For the Hadewijch in question, it's like for Saint Teresa -- you need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she's coming. There's no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.

[...]Thanks to which, naturally, you are all going to be convinced that I believe in God. I believe in the jouissance of woman insofar as it is extra, as long as you put a screen in front of this 'extra' until I have been able to properly explain it. What was attempted at the end of the last century, in Freud's time, what all sorts of decent souls around Charcot and others were trying to do, was to reduce mysticism to questions of cum. If you look closely, that's not it at all. Doesn't this jouissance one experiences and yet knows nothing about put us on the path of ex-sistence? And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?

[...] [The Other] is barred by us, of course. That doesn't mean that it suffices to bar it for nothing to exist thereof. If by [the signifier of the barred Other] I designate nothing other than woman's jouissance, it is assuredly because it is with that that I am indicating that God has not yet made his exit."

So, essentially, pornography is evil because it gets too close to recording the truth. It risks making a graven image out of this "extra" jouissance ("jouissance" being the French word for "enjoyment", but the specific connotation here is that it's an enjoyment built out of pain, an enjoyment that you can never actually possess for it would simply be the immolation of the subject, it is the "enjoyment" of Exodus 33:20: "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live"). That's not the sort of thing you can just put in a picture and go passing around willy nilly! God jealously guards his (her?) secrets.

Whenever I ask people why they think Steam should be allowed to suddenly and arbitrarily delist pornographic games, thus endangering the income of many small artists and game developers ( @gattsuru feel free to consider this a reply to your top level post as well), I am always hoping, begging that they say "because God said so". Because then I at least know they're being honest! They're attuned with themselves. I let them go in peace, I have nothing more to say. It is the sort of thing that God might plausibly say, after all. Maybe he did say that. Who am I to doubt?

Maybe people are just increasingly embarrassed now to say that it's because God said so? Or it could just be a result of where I tend to hang out. I should just go down to my local lower middle class church, because y'know the more salt-of-the-earth people, the ones who haven't had their minds poisoned by so many books and foreign cartoons, their "defense mechanisms" often aren't as developed, if we're going to use psychoanalytic language. They'll give it to me straight. If I ask them what they think of porn they'll say "the fuck's the matter with you? Don't you know anything? Haven't you read the Bible?" And that's really just the answer I was hoping for all along.

Some days I really just feel like I'm done with the whole "argument and debate" thing. Arguments are yesterday's news. What I'm interested in are the mythopoetic symbols that govern your psychic economy. That's where the real shit is. But how to get people to share? They're so often embarrassed to share, or they don't even know themselves. I suppose I could offer a trade -- my symbols for yours. I'm always willing to lay myself bare as far as my powers of introspection will allow me. This could be the next big evolution of internet discourse, huh? It's like "let's talk about our feelings" but on steroids. This idea really has some legs. Just you wait and see.

Are there any current day TnA mags still being printed?

Look through the adult section of downmagaz.net. Assuming that only the most popular titles are uploaded there the big brands are still going and there seem to be plenty of niches being served too.

I agree with FiveHourMarathon. To the extent they still exist, they are a gimmick/oddity/collectible/curiosity.

I went to an establishment in North Carolina called Biscuits N Porn, that sold breakfast sandwiches and porn magazines. They seemed to have a large number of them on sale, though it was more of a theme/gimmick than a real sales item.

Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way.

Yeah, she acted as a porn actress employed by a well know porn director in his porn film. What else would you call her other than a porn actress? If somebody murdered "grand total of one person" or somebody only burglarized "grand total of one house" - then such a criminal would only be "technically" murderer/burglar? What is this. How would you call her? I am genuinely curious.

PS: As a wise person once said - you may have built thousand bridges and only sucked one dick. But forever more, you are not going to be known as a bridgebuilder, but rather as a dicksucker.

bridgebuilder, but rather as a dicksucker.

The original version of this meme involved goats. I don't think a guy sucking dick is sufficiently transgressive to trigger the meme, and a girl sucking dick (you don't specify sex, and it doesn't matter for the goat version) definitely isn't, even in cultures where hetero oral is taboo. Among the men who metaphorically "built a thousand bridges" while sucking dick on the side, the only one who is more famous as a dicksucker than a bridgebuilder is Oscar Wilde, and only because he sued the Marquess of Queensbury.

Random question to @georgioz - where in the English-speaking world are you where "dicksucker" is more idiomatic than "cocksucker"?

Where in the English-speaking world are you where "dicksucker" is more idiomatic than "cocksucker"?

"Cocksucker" is an idiomatic insult that usually is not a synonym of "sucker of penises". "Dicksucker", in contrast, has no idiomatic meaning, and therefore can be used as a synonym of "sucker of penises".

Yeah but that’s the whole point of the insult — the one act of cocksucking makes someone a cocksucker (ie a bad thing).

I’ll not call her an actress for three reasons.

She ‘acted’ in something that cannot even reasonably be called a porn movie, to the extent that those even exist anymore. Appearing only in one casting video means you didn’t get cast and thus you aren't an actress.

Actresses in the everyday sense of the word are professionals with the corresponding studies and training. This she ain’t.

If her activity counts as acting, we might as well call all prostitutes and escorts actresses, which clearly belongs to the realm of nonsense.

'Porner' is appropriate.

I don't want to argue definitions for what counts as acting, but at the risk of stating the obvious I'll point out that a pretty sizable portion of 'casting' porn is fake and scripted (albeit usually pretty lackluster scripts); for a sizable majority, actresses and actors have already been cast and contracted before they're brought on-couch, so to speak.

That's most overt in the United States, where the 2257 requirements make screwing around too much with 'reality' porn legally risky. It's possible to work around these matters, but for every successful model you get one that results in federal charges and massive civil suits. But where Hungary and Woodman specifically has a reputation as skeezy and coercive even by the low standards of gonzo porn stars, the allegations against him largely involve deviations from the script or pre-negotiated discussions (cw: textual discussions of sex, including sexual assault, degradation-focused watersports).

Why not have literal whores become politicians?

Directional whoring is pretty much the overtly default career of young (and not so young) women in the West. They dress skimpily, date industriously, engage in serial monogamy, and are not at all averse to material benefits resulting from these activities. Many women very aggressively argue that all sexual practices and all sexual conduct that does not harm any one party without their consent is nominally okay, and if you listen closely you'll notice that the valence of such conduct is actually considered very positive. That they sometimes turn around and viciously shame individual women for their promiscuity or sexual practices or material benefits derived from either seems more like pokerfaced opportunism than ideological inconsistency.

At the same time, politicians are widely known to be the scum of the earth. Eternally corrupt, consummate liars, shameless hypocrites, will sell out your country for a handful of cash and will ruin your life's work out of sheer incompetence. At best they're naive idealists who produce policy catastrophe after administration catastrophe, but let's face it, when people think "politician", they think either of morally bankrupt sociopaths looking to line their own pockets or of rabid ideologues aiming to stroke their egoes. Natural selection among politicians selects for the ability to out-smear your opponents, not for any sort of object-level competence or moral stature. Politicians are, by necessity, cheats and liars and if they weren't they wouldn't survive.

So why not have whores becomes politicians? Do we lose anything by this happening?

“Directional whoring?” That’s ridiculous and insulting.

None of my half-dozen female cousins are whoring themselves out. None have any overlap between their careers and their relationships.

That’s not because they’re all following the same script, either. One’s an accountant, another works for the government. A third got pregnant in college, but married the guy and started a stable family. She only has a job now that the kid is in school. Not exactly a gold digger.

What’s your justification for insulting the modal Western woman?

“Directional whoring?” That’s ridiculous and insulting.

Actually, it's a typo.

And yeah, I was exaggerating. But what I stand by is this: I frequently hear women express sentiments that actually, promiscuity is good, being a camgirl is a completely normal job, and having a dozen boyfriends in one year and collecting gifts and favors from all of them on the way is par for the course and bystanders should politely not notice it. I very rarely (in fact, not in almost a decade by now) hear the opposite IRL.

And sure, #NotAllWomen. Seriously not. This behavior is not universal. But at least around me, nobody's calling anyone out on it.

What’s your justification for insulting the modal Western woman?

The ability to do so on an online forum without getting ostracized, as would happen if I critisized a woman's weird ideological commitment to this kind of libertine behavior IRL.

I frequently hear women express sentiments that actually, promiscuity is good, being a camgirl is a completely normal job, and having a dozen boyfriends in one year and collecting gifts and favors from all of them on the way is par for the course and bystanders should politely not notice it. I very rarely (in fact, not in almost a decade by now) hear the opposite IRL.

I don't know that I've heard that IRL, though I do recall even in school there were lots of girls who expressed interest in marrying a man for the money, or in using sexual appeal to get things from men, while never expressing interest in the idea of actually loving a man.

I guess these motivations have been around forever, along with the more intrinsic motivations like intimacy, companionship, physical affection, etc. But it's surprising to me how the shoe has moved to the other foot and it's much more rare for me to hear discussions of intimacy, companionship, and physical affection as the core reasons people are looking for a relationship. "I would like to have children" has a strong constituency, but I'd argue that's still an instrumental reason to have a relationship. (But an important one!)

None of my half-dozen female cousins are whoring themselves out.

With all due respect, they probably won't have many problems keeping you in the dark about if they are indeed doing so after all.

Then it’s not much of a “default career,” is it?

I think you’re defending the motte to Southkraut’s bailey.

Are we Russel's Teapotting whoring now?

It’s just the reality of living in modernity. Let’s suppose you’re a Midwestern middle-class or precariat normie and you have female cousins. One of them lives in a different town and you’re on good terms; she’s known as an average decent young woman. However, in reality she has engaged in sugarbabying and escorting on multiple occasions while in community college. She’s also a serial monogamist / is in an open relationship with some cuck and has one-night stands. Maybe she’s also camwhoring from time to time. You don’t know about any of this because she’s discrete about it and your social circles are overlapping only partially. You’re ignorant about these activities as a whole because you’re a normie. The only way you’re realistically ever going to learn about her antics is if someone tells you about it. But who would? Your other female cousins or your mother definitely won’t reveal it to you even if they know about it. Her long-term cuck boyfriend if she has one isn’t going to talk about it to you either. What gives?

Why not have literal whores become politicians?

With a little plausible deniability, a whore can already become Vice President of the United States. The list of male politicians who started their career as a catamite would also be interesting if we knew exactly who was on it.

Directional whoring is pretty much the overtly default career of young (and not so young) women in the West.

This seems false to me. PUA's, incels, and feminists with MSM megaphones all agree that young women who are not sex workers are competing harder because they are competing for the attention of a minority of high-quality men (for various values of high-quality), not because they are trying to maximise the financial return on their dating life.

I knew "career" was the wrong word to choose and might lead to a misunderstanding, but I didn't take the time to work on it. "Lifestyle" might have been better. Or "Calling". The material rewards are not the main aspect here.

But the material rewards are what makes the difference between a slut and a whore.

There is an argument to be had about whether women are getting sluttier. (Survey evidence suggests they are not, but is not exactly reliable). But I'm pretty confident that they are not getting more whoreish.

One manifestation of that are online complaints about the "Chopped Man Epidemic". Fascinating stuff from a culture warrior perspective.

For several years I've been suspecting and feeling that the majority of people in the West are ignoring the presence of quite a lot of female chauvinism, and the indoctrination into this position in many schools (often dominated by feminist teachers). Feminism itself and the creation of subtly or not so subtly misandrist attitudes that are passed down from mothers, aunts, grandmothers, are pretty much ignored as problems or excused somehow, because of "the patriarchy" or whatever else. Now it's Her Turn, etc.

I think it should be obviously true that the teaching of "women were oppressed by men throughout most history until recently and society remains male dominated", regardless of whether it's true or not, is going to result in the feelings that women as a group are the victim and deserve vindication, and that men as a group are guilty and should be sanctioned and put in their place in various ways. If you keep hearing that person A abuses person B and got away with it, you're going to be sympathetic to A and antipathic to B, right? And liberals would be very quick to complain if the media didn't obfuscate the race many violent criminals, precisely because they fear the effects on attitude that unfiltered news would have. They're much less worried about whether any sexism against men pops up, or about current dominations by the female gender of places and aspects of Western societies.

Am I onto something or am I talking gobbledygook...

And let’s also keep in mind that all of this is happening at the same time when rates of obesity, mental illness, hysteria, violence, alcoholism, antidepressant and prescription pill abuse and drug use in general have been rising among Western women for a long time.

What connection are you drawing and what do you think the mechanism might be?

What you described are factors eroding men's incentives to to fulfill their traditional masculine roles as initiators, providers, husbands etc. The factors I described do the same but in a different aspect. Potential rewards are decreasing while potential costs are increasing.

I call this "Men, amirite?" It certainly turns up among the leftists and liberal women I have the unfortunance to interact with.

The attitudes don't get passed down by mothers and grandmothers, though, they get picked up from blogs and influencers and ticktocks and reddit and wherever else it is that women get their programming from.

The most downloaded app, as of today, is the Tea app. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a gossip forum for ‘red flags’ about individual men intended to Help Women Make Better Dating Choices.

The existence of this, and of the "Are we dating the same guy" Facebook groups, is further perfect proof that the 80/20 rule is true.

No, it’s proof of fearmongering campaigns succeeding at generalizing thé behavior of the bottom 20% of men.

unfortunance

Had to check if this is a real word. It is not. :(

Yeah and there's constant double standards about this stuff. "Manosphere" and all that gets maligned like it's automatically slightly evil and should be combated. Bullshit harmful sources of programming for girls/women? crickets Just some concern about whether it's not quite girlbossy enough??

Both are monetizing sexuality in a fairly direct way, one is just a bit further along the spectrum. If you're saying the two can be distinguished, sure. If you're saying one is disqualifying for public office while the other isn't, I disagree.

With regards to the spectrum it was pointed out in the original thread that Playboy has become completely normalized as a mainstream product with a multitude of otherwise average wives (mostly suburban middle-class and higher-middle-class ones I imagine, but still) being OK with their husbands buying and reading it. This is an important difference. What obviously happened in this case is that a former porn ‘actress’ wasn’t knowingly selected for a political role i.e. whoever permitted her to be a district coordinator didn’t bother to do any serious background check.

You know, I'd actually vote for President Mandingo if he promises to "fuck them canadians all to death".

Wait, wasn’t that a South Park plot?

It was indeed. Garrison gets turned into a parody of Trump, and runs for president with his platform being to "fuck them all [illegal immigrants from Canada] to death".

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